If you work a 9 to 5 job, is it wrong not to answer work emails after 5 p.m. and before 9 a.m.?
After email first became available to the general public in the 1990s and businesses began assigning email addresses to employees, there seemed to be a bit of an urgency to responding to emails as they were received. As home users shift from dial-up to broadband connections in the early 2000s, work email relatively easily could be called up at home and it still retained some of its relative urgency. Postal mail, increasingly labeled “snail mail,” gave way to email as a faster way to communicate. As texting picked up in the late 2000s, for many it became the communication means of choice, sometimes relegating email to the “I’ll respond when I get around to it” category.
Partly, the shift seemed generational. Older email users may still view it as a preferred means of communication than texting. Younger users, however, likely preferred texting over emails or phone calls, with voicemail messages falling into the “I may or may not listen to them” camp. For some email users, the shift can be frustrating. If a student, for example, sends an older instructor an email marked “urgent” seeking information, that instructor may respond without receiving any acknowledgment for days or weeks.
When it comes to personal communications, it’s good for users to let it be known how best to reach them if a response is expected.
In a business setting, expectations of responses to emails can be different. Sure, some institutions send out so many announcements via group emails that recipients grow numb to them and often ignore them, particularly if they rarely contain information specific to them. But when a colleague emails you directly seeking information or a manager emails with a request or a directive, the expectation is that attention must be paid.
Because most of us can access our business email 24 hours a day, the question often arises about whether we should be expected to. While it would be nice to adopt a policy of not answering emails after work hours either on principle or to create boundaries conducive to better mental health, that’s not always practical.
Some employees – particularly those working virtually – work with colleagues operating in different time zones. Other employees work in businesses that don’t operate in old-school 9-to-5 parameters.
Is it wrong for employers to expect employees to respond to emails outside their 9-to-5 workday? And is it equally wrong for employees to refuse to do so?
Neither of those questions strike me as getting to how best to deal with the issue of email response policy. The right thing for companies to do is to establish clear expectations when employees are hired. If that policy isn’t made clear, the right thing is for employees to ask about such expectations.
If companies expect employees to respond to emails outside of their typical workday, they should make that clear and they should make sure that their employees are compensated to do so. If employees know that when interviewing for a prospective job, they can make an informed decision about whether that’s the right workplace environment for them.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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